Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Soylent Brown is Poopoo!

Eep, this story is a little off-putting, to put it mildly. I pretty much have the discriminating palate of a shark, but this seems to be a bridge fridge too far.

This is the money quote in the article:

The scientists hope to price it the same as actual meat, but at the moment the excrement steaks are ten to twenty times the price they should be thanks to the cost of research. Professor Ikeda understands the psychological barriers that need to be surmounted knowing that your food is made from human feces.

Charlton, Charlton, Charlton, you should be so lucky!

The best thing about this video, is that (at 1:34) the refrigerator has an English label reading "Shit Burger". Now, that's marketing! I don't understand why he's positing recycled food as being for human consumption... dogs eat POOP with relish, why not sell this shit as a dog food?

If this fecalfood actually hits the market, would one make "shitbu shitbu" out of it, or "shapoo shapoo"?

Uh, the title of the "Cooking with Dog" series is unintentionally hilarious, by the way. So much "wrongness" in one post... one shitty post.

10 comments:

Actually, you bring up a really good point. Rather than feed the stuff to humans, why not feed it to livestock and pets, so that the food currently going to them can go to humans instead? One of the things that makes meat-eating so incredibly environmentally unsound is that a lot of agriculture goes into growing the plant matter to feed to the livestock, when that agriculture could be going to people.

(Not that animals don't deserve to eat, too, but we've seriously inflated the population of species like cows, so our ranching practices definitely have an impact on the availability of agricultural yield to humans.)

Another bizarre feature of American meat production is that we feed animals things which could be used to feed humans. Cattle should be eating grass, not corn.

It puts the lie to that stupid "Why don't starving people in India just eat those cows?" argument. The cow in India eats plants which are unfit for human consumption, and provides dairy products, dung for fertilizer and fuel, and transportation. Over her lifetime, an Indian cow can produce a lot of food, while not competing with humans for calories.

Also too, aside from teh enviro benefits of not raising animals for meat - this type of tech is pretty much required for space exploration. The round trip to Mars is 2 years. Using half a pound per day, that's like a ton of meat.

Even at ten or twenty times the price, artificial meat would be way cheaper than lifting steaks out of the gravity well to a lunar base.

And that's aside from the benefit of reducing the problem of what to do with sanitation residues in those specialized environments.

Reminds me of the LGM thread about post-apocalyptic survival, when someone pointed out that the ideal companion animal for foraging will be a cat rather than a dog -- because cat digestion is designed for speed rather than efficiency so their turds are highly nutritional.

About Me

The Big Bad Bald Bastard is a character played by Monsieur _______ of the City of Y______. The role of the Bastard is a handy one to play on subways, walking the streets, and in dive-bars, when being a nerdy, bookish sort is not to one's advantage.